And there wasn’t. He caught a ride in a new Buick convertible, a man in a dark suit. They couldn’t talk in the wind, but the air was fresh and his stomach settled, and when the man let him off he was only a mile’s walk from home and was feeling better. When he got up to the porch and looked through the screen there was no one there, and though it was getting on toward dusk and shadows washed over the sink and table, there were no pots on the stove and no lights. He sat in the kitchen for a few minutes, then decided he could do the candling, get it done before dark.
“It was almost dark and a damp breeze had come up, and there was a mist moving in the branches of the highest trees. I remember clouds in the sky, coming in low over the coop, and a drop of rain or two hitting my forehead as I approached it. I could hear the chickens clucking, a few of them, and maybe I saw the shadow of one moving in the screening, jumping down from a perch.
“They were on the floor together, off in a corner on blankets, and the chickens were watching them. I had the door half open, and I must have heard something, her voice possibly, or seen the chicken light at the end of its cord where she held it, wavering. I stopped there, just inches before the door’s squeak, and heard the muffled grind of grain under the blanket where his heels shuffled and a tapping that was the long electrical cord striking the floor as she bucked over him, riding him, facing me, but not seeing me. I could see the top of his head, her arm extended, hand gripping his shoulder, while the other one brought the light out under her chin, then back into her breast, her face in the light, then out of it, eyes rolling, hair ribbons brushing her cheeks.
“She was fully dressed, in one of her Sunday dresses, a high collar, and a long full skirt that spread out over him, the hem just under his chin, covering his arms and shoulders, even his legs, and she was sitting up straight upon him, the way she always said to sit at the table, something proper, modest even, a way to be sitting for company, had there ever been any, not arrogantly, but self-contained, sitting in stillness until spoken to, as she had when she was a girl.
“But she was rocking, a movement under the fabric in her hips that I’d never seen before, not in anyone, like a child rocking on a wooden horse at a carnival, but not so insouciant, a rocking that was motivated, but not in her mind somehow. And yet above her hips she was not rocking, and her face had her mind elsewhere, in the way she often looked out the window as she was beating batter for a cake, as if she were gazing over a fence into a neighbor’s yard, her eyes focusing on desired objects and postures and events, then rolling back and moving on. Then the rocking stopped. The chicken light was at her chin, and I saw her eyes focus on me, come to a realization, then fill with hate. I couldn’t look in those eyes, and I turned away from her then, from him too, though he’d been nothing, and let the door slide silently shut behind me.
“It was three days later that she fell to the floor at the kitchen sink and died there, a heart attack. We’d not spoken nor looked in each other’s eyes since the night I’d caught her in the coop, and though Adam was gone I suspect she knew a time would come when we’d have to do those things, as if he were still present, and couldn’t continue to live in the knowledge of that necessity. She was thirty-four years old.
“But I haven’t spoken about my father enough, but for his place up on the hill under that old tree. He was a good man and an upright one, who had come on hard times, but unlike my mother was unbroken by them. I knew early on that I’d been conceived out of wedlock, though the fact went unspoken, that I’d been the cause of their marriage, which was not a good one, and, in argument, for their fall. They might have gone out on their own otherwise. They may never have married, in the first place, at all.
“It wasn’t sex that I caught her at, but the dangerous product of imagination, that one fatal step that took her beyond thought and into action, which in truth meant nothing to me, and when she saw me watching her she had reached the other side of the fence and there could be no going back again. I’d caught her denying her life, which was a terrible burden to her and was me, and she hated me for seeing her there, in that desired place, as defined without me. So I’d soiled it just in the moment that she’d reached it, and I think she couldn’t imagine her hate and that I’d seen it and had thus taken the only way out, appropriate that it be her heart.
“And there was nothing to do, but that I could do something for my father, and after the funeral I told him I’d be leaving.
“Even now I can see the look in his face, which stays with me even though he is long dead. He had to speak out of that look to hide it, but I noticed, as he was reasoning with me, halfheartedly, saying that I should stay, that he was taller than I, just a little bit, and that for the first time in a long time he was standing up straight in his body, knowing he was at the brink of freedom.
“He was standing that way still, loose in his legs and arms, his shoulder touching the old porch column, as I headed down the rutted drive. I turned once at the gate and caught him turning away, moving toward the house. He shrugged his shoulders and stepped back to the porch edge, then lifted his arm and waved. I didn’t turn to look again, and by evening I was out of Kentucky and heading north through Ohio.”
Kelly
I watched the men move slowly through the meadow in their heavy coats, as if they were exhausted refugees escaping a firestorm or a flood. It was three a.m. and moonlight falling on my cheek had awakened me, and I’d risen and gone to sit in my pajamas at the kitchen table near the stove and drink tea. The moon was in the porcelain on the table, and I could see it in the sky beyond the crest, its light in beach grass at the edge, and in a while I felt the weight of sleep upon me again and I’d gone back to my bedroom and crossed to pull the curtains closed, and then I’d seen them.
John was between them, Larry and Frank, and Gino was behind, pushing the empty chair and leaning into it, spokes caught in bearberry, wheels wobbling in the meadow’s ruts. John can walk sometimes and sometimes he can’t. It’s the chemotherapy and the way he says he feels it in his joints. But he was walking now, though a little haltingly and watching his feet, and I saw Gino raise his arm and call out and the others stop and wait for him to catch up. Then they were through the meadow and climbing up the verge to the road, and I looked beyond them to that tapered cylinder, distinct in its white painted blocks of stone against the moonlit sky. There was no need for the beam on such a night, but I could see the broad circular lenses through the glass and steel rod cage, wearing its conical witch hat at the top.
There was heavy equipment all around the lighthouse base, and a new fence, and I could see the massive I-beams that supported it, and in the moonlight I could see under them, a space tall enough for a man or a woman to stand in. The beams ran down the center of the road, like tracks, ending where the two small houses sat, awkwardly tilted, shored up and waiting for reattachment when the lighthouse arrived there. I thought about Carolyn and the Ivory soap she told me they’d be using on the beams as a lubricant. She’d be laughing and shaking her head now, then in a while, if they didn’t return, she’d call the police. She wouldn’t call the doctor. The old men had pulled this kind of thing before, just left the Manor for a walk, once even for a drink in town. They’d be coming back, or she’d get them back. She’d give them a little time.